But I was ahead of her this time.
“The Chief of Customs?” she wonderingly murmured.
I brought her up with me now. “Did Miss Josephine St. Michael say it was
over his left eye?”
The girl instantly looked everything she thought. “I believe you were
present!” This was her highly comprehensive exclamation, accompanied
also by a blush as splendidly young as John Mayrant had been while he
so stammeringly brought out his wishes concerning the cake. I at once
decided to deceive her utterly, and therefore I spoke the exact truth:
“No, I wasn’t present.”
They did their work, my true words; the false impression flowed out of
them as smoothly as California claret from a French bottle.
“I wonder who told you?” my victim remarked. “But it doesn’t really
matter. Everybody is bound to know it. You surely were the last person
with him in the churchyard?”
“Gracious!” I admitted again with splendidly mendacious veracity. “How
we do find each other out in Kings Port!”
It was not by any means the least of the delights which I took in the
company of this charming girl that sometimes she was too much for
me, and sometimes I was too much for her. It was, of course, just the
accident of our ages; in a very few years she would catch up, would
pass, would always be too much for me. Well, to-day it was happily my
turn; I wasn’t going to finish lunch without knowing all she, at any
rate, could tell me about the left eye and the man in bed.
“Forty years ago,” I now, with ingenuity, remarked, “I suppose it would
have been pistols.”
She assented. “And I like that better--don’t you--for gentlemen?”
“Well, you mean that fists are--”
“Yes,” she finished for me.
“All the same,” I maintained, “don’t you think that there ought to be
some correspondence, some proportion, between the gravity of the cause
and the gravity of--”
“Let the coal-heavers take to their fists!” she scornfully cried.
“People of our class can’t descend--”
“Well, but,” I interrupted, “then you give the coal-heavers the palm for
discrimination.”
“How’s that?”
“Why, perfectly! Your coal-heaver kills for some offenses, while for
lighter ones he--gets a bruise over the left eye.”
“You don’t meet it, you don’t meet it! What is an insult ever but an
insult?”
“Oh, we in the North notice certain degrees--insolence, impudence,
impertinence, liberties, rudeness--all different.”
She took up my phrase with a sudden odd quietness. “You in the North.”
“Why, yes. We have, alas! to expect and allow for rudeness sometimes,
even in our chosen few, and for liberties in their chosen few; it’s only
the hotel clerk and the head waiter from whom we usually get impudence;
while insolence is the chronic condition of the Wall Street rich.”
“You in the North!” she repeated. “And so your Northern eyes can’t
see it, after all!” At these words my intelligence sailed into a great
blank, while she continued: “Frankly--and forgive me for saying it--I
was hoping that you were one Northerner who would see it.”
“But see what?” I barked in my despair.
She did not help me. “If I had been a man, nothing could have insulted
me more than that. And that’s what you don’t see,” she regretfully
finished. “It seems so strange.”
I sat in the midst of my great blank, while her handsome eyes rested
upon me. In them was that look of a certain inquiry and a certain
remoteness with which one pauses, in a museum, before some specimen of
the cave-dwelling man.
“You comprehend so much,” she meditated slowly, aloud; “you’ve been such
an agreeable disappointment, because your point of view is so often the
same as ours.” She was still surveying me with the specimen expression,
when it suddenly left her. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me,” she
broke out, “that you wouldn’t have resented it yourself?”
“O dear!” my mind lamentably said to itself, inside. Of what may have
been the exterior that I presented to her, sitting over my slice of Lady
Baltimore, I can form no impression.
“Put yourself in his place,” the girl continued.
“Ah,” I gasped, “that is always so easy to say and so hard to do.”
My remark proved not a happy one. She made a brief, cold pause over
it, and then, as she wheeled round from me, back to the counter: “No
Southerner would let pass such an affront.”
It was final. She regained her usual place, she resumed her ledger; the
curly dog, who had come out to hear our conversation, went in again; I
was disgraced. Not only with the profile of her short, belligerent
nose, but with the chilly way in which she made her pencil move over the
ledger, she told me plainly that my self-respect had failed to meet
her tests. This was what my remarkable ingenuity had achieved for me. I
swallowed the last crumbs of Lady Baltimore, and went forward to settle
the account.
“I suppose I’m scarcely entitled to ask for a fresh one to-morrow,” I
ventured. “I am so fond of this cake.”
Her officialness met me adequately. “Certainly the public is entitled to
whatever we print upon our bill-of-fare.”
Now this was going to be too bad! Henceforth I was to rank merely as
“the public,” no matter how much Lady Baltimore I should lunch upon! A
happy thought seized me, and I spoke out instantly on the strength of
it.
“Miss La Heu, I’ve a confession to make.”
But upon this beginning of mine the inauspicious door opened and young
John Mayrant came in. It was all right about his left eye; anybody could
see that bruise!
“Oh!” he exclaimed, hearty, but somewhat disconcerted. “To think of
finding you here! You’re going? But I’ll see you later?”
“I hope so,” I said. “You know where I work.”
“Yes--yes. I’ll come. We’ve all sorts of things more to say, haven’t we?
We--good-by!”
Did I hear, as I gained the street, something being said about the
General, and the state of his health?